"The Roman Alphabet | 7th century BC"

What was the basis of the Roman uppercase alphabet? The Romans used a variant of the Greek alphabet as the basis for their uppercase alphabet
What were the purposes of the formal and informal styles of lettering? A rigid, formal script was used for important manuscripts and official documents and a quicker, informal style was used for letters and routine types of writing.  

Why is the Roman alphabet the most widely used and what contributions did it make? Refined several distinct styles of lettering which were used for different purposes.

From where did serifs originate? The carving of words into stone

When and where did lowercase, or minuscule, letters develop?   It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has continually altered for the last 2500 years — influenced by Etruscan, Greek, and Phoenician alphabets to the Semitic alphabet — in which the phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, several writing styles ("hands") were developed and two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands fused into one resulting in lower and upper case letters 
 
What is a ligature and why were they utilized?  Ligatures (special combined characters, "fi" "fl" "ff" and "ffi" being the most common) were originally created for two reasons. First, when working with metal type you couldn't kern these characters close enough together, so they were combined and placed on a single piece of metal. They were also used to imitate calligraphy, where these letters could be merged by hand. 


Post an example of the Roman alphabet in visual form.